Brexit: a disaster decades in the making

In a letter from 1870 that, with a few words changed, could have been written any time in the past few years, Karl Marx vividly described this dynamic: “Every industrial and commercial centre in England possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life … This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes.”